Computers are increasingly used to handle and process documents, including documents that are composites of text, photographs, drawings, and graphic layout elements. Forms, templates, specialized scanning adapters, and specific re-purposing applications all require a very high degree of accuracy in the layout definition of these layout elements. such very accurate layout definition of a digital document is commonly termed ground truth. The ground truth definition of a document should specify the type, location, size, resolution, and/or special treatment of these layout elements. Existing systems and methods require the user to be very hands-on in every step of the ground truth process. Further, existing systems and methods do not provide an output that is applicable to other image processing applications such as print-on-demand, document re-purposing, document classification and clustering, etc.